Living Wittily

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  • The world is not overcome by demolition but by reconciliation. (Bonhoeffer)

    Nan Watson died just over 10 years ago. She was a diminutive septuagenarian when I met her, and osteoporosis had reduced her height further. But size and height are no guarantee of presence, and capacity to influence those around. Her dry crackly voice was always a blessing to hear, not least because of the wisdom and counsel it conveyed. She had an instinctive kindness held in check by hard won commonsense and a rather ruthless conviction that independence was one of the fruits of the spirit Paul never got round to mentioning, and some Christians needed to pursue!

    Her sharp mind  probed into the hard to negotiate regions of life, and coming from a generation when educational opportunities were sacrificed for the sake of putting bread on the family table, she never was able to realise her potential  in any formally recognisable way. Which for all practical purposes didn’t matter – because she was also of that generation that did lifelong learning and personal development before it was all new discovered, and formalised, and reduced to programmes and processes.

    Bonhoeffer So no surprise when after an evening service she asked if I could recommend any books that would help her get a handle on Bonhoeffer. For the next few months I had conversations with her about Finkenwalde, the Confessing Church in Germany, even the nature of Christian ethics as freedom acting in love and centred on the Word made flesh. I quoted Bonhoeffer when I took her funeral – and I wish Sabine Dramm’s book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. An Introduction to His Thought had been available to give her those years before. It isn’t a popular book, yet it is accessible and written by an enthusiastic scholar whose enthusiasm doesn’t get in the way of clear exposition and fair critique. Now and then over the next few weeks I’d like to post a few reflections on Bonhoeffer in the course of reading this book and some of Bonhoeffer’s key texts. Stuart has lent me the new critically acclaimed DVD which I’ve slotted into a couple of hours of peace during my holidays.

    For now, here is Bonhoeffer’s classic statement on what it means to live with the realities of the world and in the reality of Jesus Christ:

    Ecce homo – Behold, what a man! In Him, reconciliation of the world with God was made perfect. The world is not overcome through demolition but through reconciliation. Not ideals, programs of action, not conscience, duty, responsibility, virtue, but simply and only the consummate love of God is capable of encountering reality and overcoming it. Nor is it a generalised idea of love, but God’s love truly lived in Jesus Christ, which accomplishes this. This – God’s love for the world – does not withdraw itself from reality in a rapture of noble souls foreign to the world, but instead experiences and suffers the reality of the world in all its harshness. The world does its worst to the body of Jesus Christ. But he who was martyred forgives the world its sins. This brings about reconciliation. Ecce homo.

    (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics. Edited Clifford Green, Works, Vol. 6, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005)

  • To those who have, more will be given, to those who have not, even what they have will be taken away – a new Government Policy?

    I’ve just written to my local MP and I await a response. Does anyone else who frequents this wee blethering blog agree that the new tax changes display a breathtaking unconcern for the poor? Or am I just over-reacting, poorly informed, politically naive? Anyway, here’s the gist of what I wrote.

    No doubt you are aware that tax changes as announced in the 2007 Budget come into force on Monday. And no doubt you have been part of the debate that led up to, and has followed from this change in basic rate Tax Regulations.
    My questions are straightforward.
    What possible justification does the Labour Party offer, for removing a tax band of 10% and doubling it to 20%, when it is both inevitable and self-evident that the consequences would be borne by the poorest income families in this country? Pensioners who work part time to supplement already meagre pensions, people on the minimum wage, young people starting work on the lower income scales, are so obviously the people who will be worst affected, that I am utterly astonished a Labour Government would do this to them.
    What possible justification does the Labour Party offer for decreasing the tax band from 22% to 20%, when again it is clear those who will benefit most from this are people who are not on pensions or minimum wage? Important matters of political, social and moral principle have been leached from the conscience of the Labour party when a policy actually fulfils the saying, originally stated with steel edged irony "to those who have, more will be given, and those who have not, even what they have will be taken away".
    My third question concerns the fact that these changes of Tax bands will be the focus of a discussion in one of the classes I teach at the Scottish Baptist College, based at University of the West of Scotland. What do you think will be the views of a widely representative group of people training to be ministers in Scotland, on the Labour Party’s policies from the perspectives of social justice, and ethically informed fiscal policy? Given the Labour Party’s origins in non-conformist Christian social conscience, I should have thought such a discussion might be of interest at least as one of the historic reference points of the Labour party – and also given the well publicised Christian values of a number of current Labour ministers.
    I ask these questions courteously, from a genuine sense of social concern and moral outrage. I would be grateful for a response more than that my comments have been noted. because my final question is how I, as one who will now pay LESS tax, can in conscience vote for a party and for a Member of Parliament that penalises the poor? And does so by making the well off better off.
    I look forward to your clarifications,
    Yours with considerable disappointment
    I’ll keep you informed of any responses – by the way my Labour MP’s website has the link to ‘Make Poverty History’, which heartens me considerably – providing it applies also to the poor in this country.

  • On not being owned by what we own

    5134gwgjnhl__ss500_ A story from the Desert Fathers

    One night bandits came to the hermitage of an old monastic and said: "We have come to take away everything in your cell."

    And the monastic said, "Take whatever you see my sons."

    The bandits gathered up everything they found and went away. But they left behind a little bag with silver candlesticks.

    When the monastic saw it, he picked it up and ran after them shouting. "Take these, take these. You forgot them and they are the most beautiful of all."

    Not quite a consumer led spirituality, eh? A kind of ‘turn the other cheek’ response to a greedy, grabbing culture? Overcoming the evil of robbery by generosity that makes what is stolen a gift? Uncomfortable people those desert monastics. Wouldn’t want one of them to be the church treasurer, in charge of the church development funds…… mmmm.

  • As in a mirror – Calvin and Barth

    ‘gloat’ – to dwell on with smugness or exultation.

    ‘admire’ – to regard with esteem, respect, approval or pleased surprise.

    ‘covet’ – to wish, long or crave for

    ‘bibliophile’ – to admire a book, then covet a book, and then gloat over its acquisition at a fraction of the cover price.

    ‘Confession’ – the act of telling people on this blog that today, this bibliophile has moved from coveting and admiring to gloating.

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    The picture is a detail from the Issenheim Altarpiece, and shows John the Baptist pointing to the cross and to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. A reproduction of this detail hung on Barth’s study for years, reminding him that as a theologian all he could ever do was point towards the revealed mystery of Christ crucified. What fascinates me about this magnificent volume is the approach, which takes two of the most influential and ‘epochal theological figures’ and expounds their understanding of our knowledge of God, but without making them cancel each other out, and without feeling compelled to affirm one at the expense of the other. Like a two panel diptych, the theological portrait of each is displayed, and the hinge which joins them is the equally towering figure of Immanuel Kant. Calvin’s theology was hammered out against the background of Renaissance humanism, reformation tumult and pre-modern culture; Barth’s theology was a response to ‘post-Kantian culture inclined to agnosticism’, and to those forms of liberal theology that had declined to acknowledge the transcendent otherness of the Eternal Word; – and between them one of the stellar figures of the Enlightenment, whose own views of how we know, what we know, and how we know what we know, have shaped western philosophy for centuries.

    Some books you don’t read till you have time not only to do it justice, but to let it do justice to that part of us which recognises that, sometimes, the deepest and most satisfying truths are not to be had piecemeal. They demand, and repay, the costly labour of prayerful attention; they invite us into a conversation where we need all our wits about us; they satisfy, if only for a while, that hunger to know more about what it means to know God.

  • Mere discipleship is not enough…..

    Yhst30479181885695_1978_153395172 Christianity is not cultured spirituality, but a new creation. Discipleship is well, but it was not discipleship that conquered the world for Christ, it was apostleship. It was not a disciple church but an apostolic, a church not of Christian learners but of Christian confessors. Since the decisive things of the cross, the Tomb, and Pentecost, the Christian is much more than a disciple of Christ – s/he is a member of Christ; s/he is a confessor and a regenerate. Discipleship is no match for the degeneration and egotism which are in the world by lust. We are not now Christ’s disciples merely but His purchased property; and Christianity before it is a discipline is a salvation….above all He is the Lord God with something more than a value for us – with an eternal and costly right whose value we but poorly prove. (P T Forsyth, Faith Freedom and the Future, 276-7)

    Words to give us pause about what it is we are about when ‘making disciples’ suggests a more promising future for Christ’s church than bearing costly personal witness and confessing His Lordship over our lives, to our actual cost. Forsyth’s spirituality of the cross presupposes Christian lives bought with a price, no longer our own, and called to live as those purchased outright as redeemed confessors, whose lives speak His truth by the eloquence of sacrifice.

    As always, Forsyth points to depths of Christian truth and experience that might make contemporary Evangelicalism with our passion for the practical, our desire to accentuate the accessible, seem just a little, well, shallow. ‘Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me’ is a hard lifestyle to sell to others; it’s even harder to live it for ourselves.

  • What’s a bit of ageism between friends?

    025941_1193468e Had a conversation with a couple of the University administration staff on my way out today. A beautiful late afternoon, sun shining and I was on my way home to get changed and go for a wee trot around Barshaw Park. Nothing too strenuous, just a way of loosening up and sloughing off the worst of a day’s wear and tear.

    Talking with my two admin friends about the clocks going forward Saturday past, and losing an hour’s sleep, one of my friends said it was the next night she felt tired, and was in bed at the ridiculously early hour of 9.30pm. So by way of consolatory conversation, a kind of solidarity with those who go to bed early and get up early, I mentioned that whereas I used to be able to read for an hour in bed at night, now I was struggling to clock five minutes before my eyelids did their portcullis thing.

    Whereupon the third member of this conversation said, in tones of unmistakably sincere sympathy, "Aye well – but don’t worry. That’ll come to us all". Now I don’t know if I look older than I am, or if I feel older than I look, or if I am older than I should be for my age!

    Anyway – not too old to run round the park for 50 minutes and arrive home still standing and able to hold a conversation, albeit accompanied by heavy breathing! Just about ready to run my first 10k of the year – but only when the weather is good. No point in taking chances at my age.

  • Easter and Hopeful Imagination

    Thanks to Andy for the reminder that I should have posted yesterday at Hopeful Imagination. I’m happy to do that today. The post-resurrection stories in the Gospels are amongst my favourite passages to think about, pray over, learn from and enter into. And the story of Thomas, hurt, bewildered but not ready to be conned, is one of those within which I often linger, and wonder. Tomorrow I’ll preach on the passage from John 20, and hope to communicate something of the poignancy and power of this encounter, between bewildered courage and vulnerable availability – "Here touch my hands………don’t be afraid…"……."My Lord, and my God".

  • Recent acquisitions

    No surprise that since I was over at Glasgow University Library in the diligent pursuit of knowledge, and since I was in the immediate vicinity, I found time to engage in some extreme used book searching at Voltaire and Rousseau’s. I say extreme because venturing between the stacked aisles of books in that shop isn’t all that different from walking through the threatening unstable landscapes of middle earth. I came away unscathed though, and with three purchases –

    225pxheiko_oberman_2000 one of Heiko Oberman’s earlier books, Masters of the Reformation.The emergence of a new intellectual climate in Europe (Cambridge, 1981) – a clean, hardback copy of a hard to get book. Oberman was one of the finest Reformation scholars whose detailed research and at times hard to read essays nevertheless provided a much more nuanced picture of the interface between medieval and Renaissance culture and the events and historical contexts of the European Reformations.

    John Todd’s careful study of John Wesley and the Catholic Church, a book I’ve read before but am glad to have. There’s still alot of important and unexploited insight in some of the earlier work on the Wesleys. This book, along with others like Wesley and the Church of England, and Wesley and the Puritans highlights the range and variety of Wesley’s theological taste – he has been called a ‘devout eclectic’, a classic case of pick’n mix theology long before pick ‘n mix was made a cliche for post-modern consumer led choices!

    And then it’s always good to find a book by a friend – David Smith, Mission After Christendom, a nice fresh copy to replace the one of mine that went the way of most lent out books! What I enjoyed about buying David’s book (at a ridiculously good price), was that it was shelved in the esoteric section, sandwiched between – wait for it – Buddhism Without Beliefs, a kind of western new age take on Mahayana Buddhism, and on the other side Awake at 3a.m. a study of the spiritual psychology (whatever that is) of insomnia!

    As I looked at this book on mission, pressed on both sides by quite different and alien worldviews, I couldn’t help thinking – for a book intended to open up new frontiers for witness in a globalised world, placing it amongst the esoterica seemed like an unintentional but highly symbolic prophetic act, indicating the plight of the church trying to do mission after Christendom!

  • P T Forsyth, diversionary paths, and the encounter of prayer

    P_t_forsyth Spending some time writing a piece on P T Forsyth, which is all the excuse I need to find all kinds of diversionary paths that lead down fascinating Forsythian avenues. Reading again Harry Escott’s small anthology P T Forsyth and the Cure of Souls, I began the now habitual head-nodding that is my bodily acknowledgement that once again he is right, and again, and here again. Here’s a chunk of theological granite to weigh alongside some of the overblown plastic of some of the more utilitarian, guaranteed low effort and low-cost approaches to spirituality – what Karl Rahner once called anthropoegoism – (a peculiarly modern heresy evident in a person’s self centred and self-interested approach to the Divine as a resource to be used for our purposes). Forsyth will have none of it.

    Prayer contains the very heart and height of truth – reality and action. In prayer the inmost truth of our personal being locks with the inmost reality of things, its energy finds a living Person acting as their unity and life, and we  escape the illusions of sense, self and the world. Prayer, indeed, is the great means of appropriating, out of the amalgam of illusion which means so much for our education, the pure gold of God as he wills, the Spirit as he works, and things as they are. (Escott, p. 68)

    Prayer in this sense is a form of spiritual clarifying; a willingness to be introduced to the reality of who we are in the presence God and to discover in penitent wonder and surrendering worship who God is. And that encounter strips away our illusions about what our life is for, who and what we are called to be, because ‘the soul becomes very sure of God and itself in prayer’. The living, acting Christ becomes known as the one who gives new and regenerated life and who energises and enables action. That is the meaning of one of Forsyth’s epigrams: ‘Prayer is the assimilation of a holy God’s moral strength.’

    Which means prayer is transformative – of personality and character, of politics and society, of human failing and human longing. ‘Prayer, as our greatest work, breeds in us the flair for the greatest work of God, the instinct of his kingdom, and the sense of his track of time.’ (Escott p. 81).

    Right back to that article what needs writing!

  • Exegetical prestidigitation…..Eh?

    Her Testimony is True

    Poussin88 "Establishing equality for all persons regardless of their gender (or any other characteristic) is a cause surely born in the heart of God. But the cause of women’s equality is not advanced, rather, it is hindered whenever we attempt to force biblical texts to say things we might wish to hear but they do not say. Just as it is dishonest to deny that certain New Testament texts sanctioned slavery, but also fallacious to argue that such texts warrant the sanction of slavery today, it is counterproductive to contend that the Gospel of John is a document that passes edicts for its context and for ours on how women can and should function in the church. That sort of reading amounts  to an act of exegetical prestidigitation that in essence admits that those who would use the Bible  as a warrant to impose specific patterns of order from ancient communities onto modern ones have a case worthy of being contested. It is to lend dignity to what is actually a frivolous case for the subordination of women….

    God’s will for Christians is not that they rigidly duplicate the life and ministry of Jesus or his first disciples or the Johannine community (as if such a thing were possible), but that they discover, through the Spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ for each community in its own time and place. It is possible to discover God’s will for any contemporary context by Spirit-led exegetical and hermeneutical study of John’s Gospel, but not by prohecting contemporary contexts back on to it. Any exegesis is strained that has the Gospel of John setting out roles for people on the basis of gender or any other category, and is in fact contrary to john’s teaching that all believers are God’s children who, born of the Spirit, move in ways that defy human delineation (Jn 1.12-13; 3.5-8).

    The witnessing disciple responsible for the inscription of John’s Gospels defines the book as a testimony, and his testimony is vouched to be true (Jn 21.24). Are the testimonies of the women that this disciple reports also guaranteed to be true? Is her testimony true just as his testimony is true. It depends, then as now, not upon the gender but upon the faith of the witness who is born of the Spirit as a child of God. Their testimony is true who truly believe that the messiah, the Son of God, is Jesus."

    (Her Testimony is True. Women as Witnesses According to John, JSNTS 125, Robert G Maccini (Sheffield Academic Press 1996) 251-2.

    Bob’s own disclaimer in the Preface is an important indication of how hard good scholarship tries to make allowances for the scholar’s own standpoint. Just one more reason why I love RGM as a friend and respect him as a scholar.

    ‘Because of my vested interest in the advancement of women in the church, I am predisposed to want the New Testament to be favourable towards women. That predisposition cannot be removed, and so I have tried to keep it in view if not in check by playing the devil’s advocate against myself throughout the research. Readers will judge for themselves whether or not this gambit was desirable, successful, or even possible.’